Wayne Armond began his musical career as a member of the Hell’s Angels in the 1970s. At the time he was a high school student. During this period he supported a number of leading Jamaican artists in performance, among them the Wailers, Ken Boothe, Delroy Wilson, Derrick Harriott and Marcia Griffiths. In 1978, he joined Byron Lee and the Dragonaires and formed the seminal reggae band Chalice two years later. With Chalice, he wrote and recorded a number of hits including “I Still Love You,” “Good To Be There,” “Dangerous Disturbances,” “Can’t Dub,” and “Revival Time.”

While Chalice was on hiatus for a number of years, Wayne toured as a guitarist with reggae icon Jimmy Cliff and jazz legend Monty Alexander. He’s done studio recordings with Alpha Blondy, Maxi Priest and Manu Dibango and written songs for Rita Marley, Culture, J.C. Lodge and Dennis Brown.

Melvin Van Peebles’ numerous achievements include the French Legion of Honor, the 1999 Chicago Underground Film Festival's Lifetime Achievement Award, several Tony Award nominations, a Grammy Award nomination, and a Gotham Award from the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Nearly forty years after breaking his way into public consciousness, the indefatigable godfather of indie features and African American cinema presents a graphic novel Confessions of a Ex-Doofus-Itchy-Footed Mutha, which serves as the basis of his latest film. Beholden to no one but himself, Mr. Van Peebles brings the big screen alive on the printed page in this delicious romp about a soul-searching globetrotter.

Alwyn Scott’s odyssey with the stage began at the early age of six, with performances at Kingsgate Christian Church. During his high school years at Jamaica College he won an OAS Fellowship to study acting at the Duke Ellington School of the Performing Arts in Washington DC. Since then he has won four ITI Actor Boy awards in the category of Best Actor.

An experienced producer and presenter on radio and TV, Mr. Scott is currently the CEO of Global Media Services, and Caribbean Retail Networks.

Patrick French is a British writer and historian. His books include The
World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul (2008), which won America’s National Book Critics Circle Award and was shortlisted for the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize. His international bestseller Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land (2003), was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book of the Year Award and was a “Best Book of the Year” selection in New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine, The Economist, People, Time and the Caribbean Review of Books.

Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer (1994) won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize. Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division (1997) won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. A regular television commentator on CNN, Al-Jazeera and the BBC, Mr. French was born in Hampshire, England in 1966, and has an MA Honours degree in English and American Literature from Edinburgh University

Millicent A. A. Graham was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1974. She earned an M.Sc. In Human Centred Computer Systems at the University of Sussex, in the UK, and is a practicing Information Architect. Her first book of poems, The Damp in Things, was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2009. Ms. Graham is a Calabash Writer’s Workshop Fellow.

Laura Fish was born in London in 1964, of Caribbean parents. She has lived in Southern Africa and Australia, and has held posts as a Creative Writing tutor at various universities. They include the University of East Anglia, where she recently completed a Ph.D in Creative and Critical Writing. She holds a RCUK Academic Fellowship in Creative Writing at Newcastle University.

Her first novel, Flight of the Black Swans, was published in 1995 and Strange Music in 2009. Strange Music has been long listed for the 2009 Orange Prize.  

Joseph Boyden is the author of the story collection Born with a Tooth, and the novels Three Day Road and Through Black Spruce, the 2008 winner of the ScotiaBank Giller Prize. Three Day Road, which has been translated to date into a dozen languages, was chosen for The Today Show’s book club as well as the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program.

Other awards for Three Day Road include The Rogers Writers Trust Prize; the Canadian Authors Association Book of the Year Award; and France’s Prix Literaire. Mr. Boyden is a contributing writer for Canada’s Maclean’s magazine and has published and continues to publish fiction and nonfiction in a variety of places, including Spirit Magazine, Black Warrior Review, the Walrus, Driven, and the Globe and Mail.

Kwame Dawes was born in Ghana, raised in Jamaica and now resides in the United States.  A prolific playwright with some twenty produced plays, he has also published fourteen books of poetry, two books of fiction, several books of criticism, a children’s book and a memoir.  His book Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius remains the most authoritative study of the lyrics of Bob Marley. His most recent collection, Hope’s Hospice (Peepal Tree Press) appeared this year.  

Kwame Dawes’s literary awards include a Pushcart Prize, the Forward Poetry Prize, the Poetry Business Prize, The Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. He received the Jamaica Musgrave Silver Medal in 2007, the South Carolina Verner Governor’s Award for the Arts in 2008 and was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors in 2009. Dawes is the Distinguished Poet in Residence at the University of South Carolina where he is the Louise Frye Scudder Professor of Humanities and the Director of the South Carolina Poetry Initiative and the University of South Carolina Arts Institute.

Marlon James was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1970. His first novel John Crow’s Devil was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Commonwealth Prize, and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. His short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Iron Balloons, Bronx Noir, and Silent Voices. His non fiction writing has appeared in the Caribbean Review of Books.

Currently a professor of literature and creative writing at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, he divides his time between Jamaica, New York City, and the Twin Cities. His second novel The Book Of Night Women has been released in 2009 to widespread critical acclaim.

The poems of Esther Phillips have been anthologized in The Whistling Bird: Women Writers of the Caribbean; and Blue Latitudes: Caribbean Women Writers at Home and Abroad.  Her first collection of poems, When Ground Doves Fly was published in 2003 by Ian Randle. Peepal Tree will publish her second collection of poems, The Stone Gatherers, later on this year.

Ms. Phillips is the Head of the Division of Liberal Arts at the Barbados Community College in addition to being the founder of Writers Ink Barbados and the editor of the literary journal Bim: Arts for the 21st Century.

A proud Jamaican national, Staceyann Chin is the author of the memoir The Other Side of Paradise, published this year by Scribner. A fulltime writer and activist, she identifies as Caribbean and Black, Asian and lesbian, woman and resident of New York. She is best known as co-writer and original performer in the Tony Award winning, Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway.

The recipient of the 2007 Power of the Voice Award from Human Rights Campaign, Ms. Chin was also featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show and on 60 Minutes. Her three one-woman shows, Hands Afire, Unspeakable Things, and Border/Clash all opened to rave reviews at the Culture Project in New York City.

Founding member of the stellar reggae band Third World, Ibo Cooper has toured the world and recorded with singers and musicians around the globe. Currently this acclaimed singer, songwriter and keyboard player devotes the majority of his time to the development of young musicians at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts.

Junot Díaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and is the author of Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker; African Voices; Best American Short Stories (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000); in Pushcart Prize XXII and in The O'Henry Prize Stories 2009.

He has received a Eugene McDermott Award, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Lila Acheson Wallace Readers Digest Award, the 2002 Pen/Malamud Award, the 2003 US-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the fiction editor at the Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Most Hon. Edward Seaga was the prime minister of Jamaica from 1980 to 1989 and the leader of the Jamaica Labour Party for 30 years. He is currently the Pro-Chancellor of the University of Technology, a Distinguished Fellow of the University of the West Indies and a Fellow of the Institute of Jamaica. He has been honoured by four nations and five universities, and in 2002 was conferred with Jamaica’s second highest national honor, the Order of the Nation.

The Autobiography of Edward Seaga, forthcoming from Macmillan, is certain to be a most valuable insight into Jamaica’s recent history, pre-independence to present, because he is the only person who was involved throughout this critical period in virtually all the major policy discussions and developments, whether as Member of Parliament, Leader of the Opposition or Prime Minister.

George Lamming is renowned novelist and cultural critic. He is a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Brown University in Rhode Island and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Errol Barrow Centre for the Creative Imagination at the University of the West Indies in Barbados.

His six novels are: In the Castle Of My Skin; The Emigrants; Of Age and Innocence; Season Of Adventure; Natives of My Person; and Water With Berries.

Seretse Small’s training began at the Jamaica School of Music then continued at the Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory of Music. He made his name as a jazz guitarist and has performed at major jazz festivals in Grenada, Jamaica and St Lucia. He’s also appeared as a featured artiste on the TV channel BET on Jazz.

Seretse spent three years on a world tour with Grammy-winning artiste Sean Paul. Since then he’s returned to Jamaica to focus on running his own music publishing company, Griot Music, which was selected as the National Coordinator for the Global Battle of the Bands. He’s also formed his own band, Sereste and the True Democrats.

Program: One Step Ahead (The Lyrics of Beres Hammond)

Pico Iyer was born in Oxford, England, to parents from India, and educated at Eton, Oxford and Harvard. He is the author of two novels and seven works of non-fiction, including Video Night in Kathmandu; The Lady and the Monk; and The Global Soul.

An essayist for Time magazine for more than twenty years, Mr. Iyer also writes regularly on literature for the New York Review of Books, on globalism for Harper’s, and on everything for newspapers from the New York Times to the Financial Times. His most recent book, The Open Road, describing 34 years of talks and travels with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, was published in a dozen countries and was a bestseller across the U.S.

Xu Xi is one of Asia’s leading writers in English and the author of seven books. They include the essay collection Evanescent Isles, the novel The Unwalled City and Overleaf Hong Kong: Stories & Essays of the Chinese Overseas. She is also editor of three anthologies of Hong Kong writing in English. Her new novel, Habit of a Foreign Sky, was shortlisted for the inaugural MAN Asian Literary Prize and will be released this fall.

Xu Xi is currently the Bedell Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. She is also on the prose faculty at Vermont College. A Chinese-Indonesian native of Hong Kong, she now inhabits the flight path connecting New York, Hong Kong and the South Island of New Zealand.

Paul Holdengräber is the Director of Public Programs at The New York Public Library and founder and director of LIVE from the NYPL, a program of lively conversations, debates and surprise performances best described as “cognitive theater.”

Since Spring 2005, participants of LIVE from the NYPL have included John Hope Franklin with President Bill Clinton, Günter Grass with Norman Mailer (Mailer's last public appearance), Tina Brown, Dominique de Villepin, Jonathan Demme with Steve Earle, and Miranda July with David Byrne. Before coming to the New York Public Library, Holdengräber was founder and director of the Institute for Art and Cultures at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

Selwyn R. Cudjoe is a professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. He has also taught at Harvard, Cornell, Brown and Fordham universities. He was also the Marion Butler McLean Professor of the History of Ideas at Wellesley College and a Senior Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.

Professor Cudjoe is the author of several books including Resistance and Caribbean Literature (1980); V. S. Naipaul (1988); Beyond Boundaries (2003) and Caribbean Visionary (2009). He is also the editor of Caribbean Women Writers (1990); C. L. R. James: His Intellectual Legacies (1995) and Eric E. Williams Speaks (1993). He has also written for several publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe.

Geoffrey Philp is the author of a children’s book Grandpa Sydney’s Anancy Stories; a novel, Benjamin, My Son; a collection of short stories, Uncle Obadiah and the Alien, and five poetry collections. They are Exodus and Other Poems; Florida Bound; Hurricane Center; Xango Music; and Twelve Poems and A Story for Christmas.

His next book, Who's Your Daddy? And Other Stories, will be published by Peepal Tree Press in May 2009. He lives in Miami, Florida.

Program: Bi-Textuals

Terese Svoboda has published ten books of prose and poetry. Her most recent book of poetry is Treason. Weapons Grade is forthcoming from the University of Arkansas Press.

Her honors include the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, an O. Henry Prize for short fiction, a Pushcart Prize for nonfiction, a Jerome Foundation grant in video, the John Golden Award in playwriting, the Bobst Prize in fiction and the Iowa Prize in poetry. She lives in New York City and often writes about the south Sudanese, the Cook Islanders, and African American soldiers in postwar Japan.

Anthony C. Winkler was born in Kingston, Jamaica, February 25, 1942. He was educated at Excelsior primary school and—after his family moved to Montego Bay—at Mount Alvernia Academy and Cornwall College, from which he was expelled in 1957.

Entering the insurance industry in Kingston, he was fired six times—all for allegedly being "faisty"—then fled to California where his faistyness was seen as colourful. He returned home 13 years later after earning an M.A. degree in English and having written several popular college English textbooks. He took a position as a tutor at Moneague Teachers College and immediately fell afoul of the Ministry of Education, escaping a firing only by quitting in the nick of time. He has written several novels, two movies, 13 plays, not to mention a pile of short stories and some incidental poetry—to say nothing of some 15 college textbooks that continue to sell quite well and support his junkets to occasions such as Calabash.

Steve Golding toured the world as the rhythm guitarist for Peter Tosh between 1981 and 1983. During that time he also worked on albums for Judy Mowatt and Rita Marley of the I Threes. He began his professional career as musician in the late 1960s when he joined the Rhythms, which paved his way for membership in the Fabulous Five in 1970. He remained with this popular Jamaican group until 1975. During this time, Mr. Golding also played guitar and percussions for the National Dance Theater Company of Jamaica (NDTC).

Many people remember Mr. Golding from his ten-year stint as a performer on Jamaica’s north coast with his childhood friend Ossie D. A founding member of the Jamaica Association of Composers, Artists and Performers (JACAP). Mr. Golding is involved in music in various aspects, including performance and teaching.

Velma Pollard is the author of a novel, two collections of short fiction and three books of poetry. Her novella Karl won the Casa de las Americas prize in 1992. Her most recent collection of poems is Leaving Traces, was published by Peepal Tree in 2008. Dr Pollard was awarded the Silver Musgrave Medal by the Institute of Jamaica in 2006.

She is a retired Senior Lecturer in Language Education at the University of the West Indies at Mona. Her major research interests have been creole languages of the anglophone Caribbean, the language of Caribbean literature and Caribbean women’s writing.

Rachel Manley was born in Cornwall, England in 1955, daughter of an English mother and Jamaican father, the future Prime Minister, Michael Manley. At the age of two she was sent to Jamaica and was thereafter brought up by her grandparents, Norman and Edna Manley.

Her first memoir Drumblair: Memories of a Jamaican Childhood (1996) was about those years and won the Canadian Governor General’s Literary Award in 1997. She has since written two additional memoirs, Slipstream: A Daughter Remembers (2000) about her father’s political life and his final battle with cancer, and most recently Horses in Her Hair: A Granddaughter’s Story (2008), which tells the remarkable story of Edna Manley, who many regard as the mother of Jamaican art. Ms. Manley is currently working on The Applestrudle Tree, which will be published in 2010. She teaches creative writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Edwidge Danticat was born in Haiti and came to the United States at the age of twelve. She is the author of several acclaimed works of fiction including Krik? Krak!; Breath, Eyes, Memory and The Dew Breaker. Her most recent book Brother, I’m Dying won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle award for autobiography. She is the editor of The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States and The Beacon Best of 2000: Great Writing by Women and Men of All Colors and Cultures.

She has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and is an American Book Award winner, as well as the winner of the first Story Prize. She lives in Miami with her husband and two daughters.

Robert Pinsky’s most recent book of poetry is Gulf Music. Earlier works include The Figured Wheel, awarded the Lenore Marshall Prize, and The Inferno of Dante, which won the Howard Morton Landon Prize in translation as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Award.

His prose works include The Life of David, an account of the Biblical hero and the recent Thousands of Broadways: Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town. A three-time Poet Laureate of the United States, Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project, whose most recent anthology is An Invitation to Poetry. The volume includes a DVD that features Americans reading and talking about beloved poems. Mr. Pinsky’s works about poetry include The Sounds of Poetry and Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry, based on his Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Princeton University. In addition to teaching in the graduate creative writing program at Boston University, Mr. Pinsky is the poetry editor of the online magazine Slate.

Dr. Kingsley "Ragashanti" Stewart — aka Mr. Mix Up an Blenda — is the host of Jamaica’s most popular radio talk show, Ragashanti Live! He is also a renowned entertainer, comedian and highly sought-after master of ceremonies.

Mr. Shanti earned his B.A. in African Studies and Psychology from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. He earned an M.A. in Counseling and Psychotherapy and a Ph.D in Anthropology from the University of Connecticut. He is a lecturer and researcher at the University of the West Indies in the Department of Sociology, Psychology and Social Work.

Justine Henzell is a freelance film, television and theater producer in addition to being the Production director and one of the founders of the Calabash International Literary Festival Trust. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, where she still resides, she began her professional life as an entertainment manager then switched gears to pursue a career in business. She spent fifteen years at the Hart Group of Companies, where she rose from the accounting department to become the Group Financial Controller. She then joined Chris Blackwell’s Island Jamaica, where she was in charge of special projects and events.

Today, Justine oversees the legacy of The Harder They Come, the award winning movie, co-written, produced and directed by her father, Perry Henzell, which continues to reach a global audience over thirty years after its release. Justine serves as the script consultant for the stage musical version of the film, which will open in Toronto this summer after having completed a successful run on London’s West End. Justine has two teenage children, Drew and Dylan.

Marilyn Chin is the author of three books. They are Rhapsody in Plain Yellow; Dwarf Bamboo; and The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty. Her newest book of fiction, Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, will be published by Norton in September, 2009.

Marilyn Chin was born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon. Her books have become Asian American classics and are taught in classrooms internationally.  She has won numerous awards for her poetry, including the United Artist Foundation Fellowship, the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard and the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at Bellagio. She is featured in a variety of anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women and The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. In addition to writing poetry and tales, she has translated poems by the modern Chinese poet Ai Qing and co-translated poems by the Japanese poet Gozo Yoshimasu. She teaches in the MFA program at San Diego State University.

After returning to Jamaica from drama school in London, Kerstin Pringle Whittaker started working on films, then produced music videos and plays. She also acts, most recently in the BBC & Ruby film Small Island based on the award-winning book of the same name by Andrea Levy. Her most recent stage performance was in The Perfect Setup, which was nominated for an Actor Boy award as best comedy of 2008.

Kerstin enjoys painting and writing. Three of her short films for children have been broadcast on TV and in Jamaican cinemas. She is currently completing the screenplay for another children’s adventure.

Helon Habila was born in Nigeria and educated at the University of Jos, Nigeria, and the University of East Anglia, UK. His first novel, Waiting for an Angel (2003) was awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (Africa Region) and is presently being made into a movie. Habila's most recent novel, Measuring Time (2007), was awarded the Virginia Library Foundation's fiction award, 2008.  His short stories have won the Caine Prize, 2001; and the Emily Balch Prize, 2007.

Habila was the first African Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, England from 2002 to 2004, and then the Chinua Achebe Fellow in Global Africana Studies at Bard College, New York, 2005/2006.  He was co-editor of the British Council's New Writing 14 anthology (2006) with Lavinia Greenlaw; he was co-editor of the anthology, Dream, Miracles and Jazz (2008) with Kadija George; and is currently co-editing the Granta Book of African Short Story with Binyavanga Wainaina. He is  a contributing editor to the Virginia Quarterly Review and a columnist for the Nigerian newspaper, NEXT.

Currently Habila is with the creative writing faculty of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, USA.

Program: Love in the Time of Obama